Post by Brushinobi in Behacked comments

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Hello !

First, let me tell you that this is my new favorite game ! It is simple to understand but very captivating and I absolutely love the music (even when playing for a long time it doesn't get on my nerves at all).

FYI I noticed a few bugs that can completely ruin a run, and also a few broken combo that can just obliterate waves ad waves of enemies (very satisfying but waaaay overpowered)...

Game-Breaking bugs :

- Soft-lock when a tile is destroyed while in queue. You can't match anything and have to let your perks do the work for you

- Sometimes the tiles get stuck in queue for a few seconds before swapping, so the enemies move in the mean time and it can be useless. Also you have to wait for the queue to apply so you are defenseless and can die very easily.

- If you are "too good" with a completely overpowered skill combination the game can't keep up and freezes. (The music still worked though) For context, my combination was so overpowered that the game was playing itself for more than 20 minutes because new tiles were destroyed again and again, and I am pretty sure I had to be "lucky" for a bad enough layout to happen and stop that.

- There is indeed a big issue with orange tiles. For most games the initial layout isn't affected but after that orange tiles don't spawn at all until you pick the "trump color" perk that seem to fix spawn rates. I must admit that it is pretty amusing that the perk fixing orange tiles could be named after Donald Trump though 😂 it's like a random Easter egg made by coincidence.

Overpowered perks and combos :

- "Inner demon" is completely overpowered, because with only a x5 combo you can clear the board, and if you have good perks it is way too easy to do.

- With "Trump color" + "Wildcard" + "Fallout" on the exact same color you can get almost infinite combos where most of the board clears again and again.(until the game crashes of course) Without the "Inner demon" perk that kept resetting the combo I am pretty sure I would have had something like x400 or x500 when it crashed, and I was about to break the current world record by far.

Suggestions :

- Obviously, fix the bugs :-p

- Make the "inner demon" skill deal 1 damage to every enemy on the board instead of killing them instantly, it would still be powerful but not necessarily game breaking.

- Possibly remove the "wildcard" skill and/or the "trump color" skill, because if you combine the two it is way too easy to make long combos

- Add more and more tile colors the longer the game lasts, that way it will become harder to make long combos and break the game. The more colors you have the worst it gets for accessibility and colorblind people, but it probably can't be helped :-/

Keep up the good work ! I can't wait to play the final version of the game ! :-D

anttihaavikko2 years ago

Nice, thanks for the lengthy feedback! ❤️

Yeah, will surely fix the bugs and do some balancing after the jam is completely over. The queued swap tile getting destroyed softlock seems to be the most annoying and common issue right now but at least it is something that'll be easily fixed too. I guess you still encountered some other missing null check case when those long combos are going on still.

Oh dang, I guess the orange tiles don't spawn after all. When this first was mentioned, I just checked the initial layout but of course that isn't the whole story. It's indeed the new tile spawning where orange is missing. I'm pretty sure it was due to introduction of the trump color skill and refactoring the color picking code at that point. Otherwise I would probably have noticed it during dev testings. Nice catch! 👍

The skill is not named after Trump (I guess you noticed that it turns your character orange and gives you a yellow hair piece) but kinda the other way around. As I was thinking of a name for the skill, the Finnish term for trump (a power suit in many card games), "valtti" came to mind. I couldn't even remember the English word for it so I had to do a bit of searching. Well the results were that of course and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to use that term anymore at all. Didn't come up with anything better so I decided to keep it with the visual representation easter egg.

Yeah something is wrong with the enemy turns sometimes. It somehow gets stuck to "enemy turn" even though none of em is moving and obviously can cause some annoying deaths. This thing was noticed during the dev week too but wasn't a huge priority as it kinda solves itself out after all the enemies have moved again and there were a lot more important stuff to fix near the end of the jam. 😅

Yup, something needs to be done to inner demon. Sadly It's just too ~~fun~~ good. Damage cap instead of fully killing is at least something that must be done but I think even increasing the multi combo point might need a bit of a bump too. I could of course lock some too good skill pairs so that once you got one, other wouldn't be offered anymore but dunno if that would be going too far to playing the fun police. And I'm sure I'll be introducing more broken skills too, I still have a list of about 30 ones I didn't get to implement yet. 😆

Wildcard is too fun in a brain melting and accident inducing way to get rid of. I have some ideas how to make the infinite comboing stop. As one might notice, Tetris Attack (and such) is a big inspiration and it has these stone blocks that player needs to break with a connecting match. I did think of somehow introducing them (even some of those skills I had already todo listed mentioned them) and they'd be the perfect tool for blocking the infinite combos. Incrementally increasing the spawn rate of such instead of a normal tile the longer the combo is going on. This would also make the row/column clearers and other such AoE destroy skills more valuable.

Thanks again for the feedback! ❤️

Brushinobi2 years ago

My pleasure ! :-D This game is amazing and has the potential to become a masterpiece if you push it further ! You revisited match-3 games in a very clever way and the rogue-like mechanics work really well.

I know that the skill was named after a trump card and not Donald Trump, but I thought it was funny because the only color with issues is the orange one !

I forgot to mention it, but I am pretty sure every time the queue got stuck there was a bird enemy on the map (that could then run away or kill me if it happened when I am in front of it). Maybe because it moves pretty fast compared to other enemies ?

Inner demon is sooo satisfying, but it also kind of spoils the challenge. However in the current version it became mandatory at some point with so many enemies spawning.

I think locking a skill when you get the other one would probably feel unfair for the player and kind of ruin the fun. That's why I suggested adding more colors, because the more you have the harder it is to make infinite combos even with powerful skill combinations. But the neutral tiles is a good idea too ! They're not incompatible so maybe both then ? I guess with these solutions you will just have to be careful and check that the player cannot get soft-lock with no match possibility at all because that would be very frustrating to clear the board and be punished for it.

30 new skills !? :-D I love this game more and more !

I hate the cocatrix though xD I had around 150 HP at lvl 70, but one spawned on the tile next to mine and one-shot me before I could do anything because I didn't have the possibility to get rid of it immediately. :-p

Do you plan to add new enemies as well ? There are a lot of possibilities with fantasy bestiaries !

Have a nice day.

anttihaavikko2 years ago

Oh yeah true, neutral tiles could easily force player to a state where no matches can be found anymore. I did think of even adding a check for such and resetting the board but at its current state it felt like it would pretty much never happen.

More enemies definitely too but I pretty much exhausted what I had planned already. Of course easy enough to come up with more though. Good thing I managed to capture the scary nature of cockatricke then. 😅 Those things were like the bane of my existence back in the day when I was getting started playing NetHack.

I think the reason for the issue with getting stuck on enemy turn must be some already dead enemy still being on the list when it's doing their movements or something. Of course the bird (which is a bat by the way) could have something to do with it too.

Brushinobi2 years ago

"The bane of my existence" seems like a fair enough description ! xD I never liked them in any game.

My bad I meant bat but wrote bird !

Anyway, if at some point you need help beta-testing the next versions just let me know and I'll be happy to help you when I have time :-)

itch.io

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